


White Pine

by Quiddity



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, VLD Secret Valentine 2017, craft store AU, mentioned Shallura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 09:57:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9716462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quiddity/pseuds/Quiddity
Summary: Lance is thinking about Keith a lot. Like. A lot. Like he snuck Cocoa home with him a couple nights this week. That he’d set her on his entertainment system just above his tv. That he’d had to restart his episode of Parks and Rec twice over because he kept thinking about Keith bent over a single piece of dark wood. Hours and hours of shaping, sanding, and polishing, bringing life out of wood grain and dust. A work of tenacity and devotion.Lance works in a craft store. Keith is volunteered to teach a class on wood carving. Lance is absolutely smitten.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my gift for pwipart on tumblr for the VLD Secret Valentine 2017. 
> 
> You asked if I could do a crafts store AU and I INSTANTLY knew what I wanted to do. I was super inspired and had a ton of fun writing this. I reallly hope you like it and have a great Valentine's Day~

The Lion’s Share certainly isn’t a big name store like Joann’s but Lance has grown awfully attached to his job there. More fond than a lot of people would believe, considering it’s retail, but well, he likes his boss Allura. If he behaves himself she has a tendency to give him really good discounts to feed his yarn addiction. A small store like this, tucked right in the middle of a knot of antique shops and family run cafes means they have a small but dedicated customer base. Lance feels like he knows almost everyone who comes in through the front door. He knows everyone’s hobby, how their family’s doing, all the gossip floating around. Honestly, it’s perfect for a social butterfly like himself. 

“What did you get your hands on this time?” Lance asks. He holds a red silicone cupcake pan, scans it, then flaps it around a bit in front of him. Hunk reaches out and takes it from him, putting it in the bag himself while Lance inspects the icing tips before scanning those as well. Hunk was a master chef. The fact that he’s buying cupcake pans and icing tips means nothing. He could be making a steak dinner for all Lance knows. “Is it worth loaning you my employee discount?” 

“You know it is,” Hunk says. Lance pulls his ID down and runs it over the scanner as well. “I got some really nice bourbon. Strong on the vanilla, little bit of lemon. I wanted to try a few cake recipes and see how they turned out. I’m thinking cherry and chocolate.” Lance is miming drooling when Allura comes up and narrows her eyes at the discount still showing on the register. Hunk, at least, has the decency to look cowed under her stare.

“I finished scheduling next month’s class. Will you hang these up? You know how it goes. Half on the front counter, half over by fabrics,” she says, handing a slim stack of coral colored flyers to Lance. She turns her sweetest smile on Hunk. “Since Lance was kind enough to give you his employee discount, you’re going to share with  _ both  _ of us, yes?” Hunk clears his throat as he pulls out his wallet. 

“You know I always need you for testing,” Hunk says. Allura is pleased enough with that and hands him a flyer while Lance makes change.

“What is it this month?” Lance asks. Every month, one evening a week, the Lion’s Share hosted a class for the locals. The teacher was almost always a regular and they taught anything from sewing to cake decorating to knitting (Lance’s current obsession).  

“Woodworking. Someone called me this morning and said he had a friend who wanted to volunteer, so at least I don’t have to find someone myself,” Allura says. Lance picks up the topmost flyer and scans through it. Woodworking. Twenty dollar sign-up fee. January 30th deadline. Four classes on every Wednesday of February. Lance’s eyes catch on the name before he starts sticking tape around the edges. 

“Keith? Sounds like a mountain man,” he muses. Hunk shrugs. 

“Sounds more greaser to me. You ever see that movie ‘The Outsiders’? He’s straight out of that movie,” Hunk says. Allura frowns. 

“Keith sounds perfectly normal to me, so no mountain man comments, Lance,” Allura warns. Lance does his best not to look sassy while he separates the rest of the flyers into two stacks, setting one neatly to the side on the counter. 

“Hunk, ten dollars if he’s greaser,” Lance says quickly. He darts past Allura to dodge the swipe she takes at him, dutifully sticking the flyer to the front window, perfectly at eye level. 

  
  


“Uhm, I’m here for the woodworking class?” Lance sees a scuffed pair of boots from his place kneeling on the floor, a skein of yarn in each hand. He follows the boots up over dark, dusty jeans, a worn t-shirt over a lightly toned chest and- 

Lance has the rather strange sensation of his mind sprinting off in two different directions. 

On one hand. He owes Hunk ten dollars. The black, roughly cut hair, the way it falls over big, big blue eyes, the guarded, almost aggressive expression. Even looking nothing like him, Lance takes one glance at the guy and he’s thinking of a scuffed up Ralph Macchio. On the other hand the guy is like way,  _ way  _ cuter than Johnny Boy ever was. They stare at each other until the guy wrinkles his noses and these cute little bags show up under his eyes and oh that’s right- He should say something. 

“Keith?” Lance asks. He pulls his eyes off the newcomer, his heart lurching in happy somersaults as he puts away the skeins and pushes up until he’s standing, his toes prickling with sleepiness. Keith nods.

“Yeah. I wanted to ask where I should put my things,” Keith says. Lance checks his watch and sees that the first class starts in about fifteen minutes. 

“Yeah, uh, okay. You’ve got a couple tables over here,” Lance says. He pushes the box of yarn he was stocking over to the side with his toe and brushes past Keith. Yes, on the front counter there’s a large box filled with small blocks of wood and a stack of little carving knives, all the blades covered in a soft sheath. 

“Do you,” Keith starts. He follows Lance over to the front counter and reaches into the box. He pulls out something wrapped in the kind of blue rag he often sees stuffed into mechanic’s pockets. “Allura asked me if I could leave example of some of my work that you could set out on the counter? Do you have a place for this?” 

Lance takes it from Keith and pulls back the rag. Inside is a panther, stalking, back hunched lightly at the shoulders in aggression. It’s carved from dark, dark wood, every line smooth and flowing from the nose to the flickering tip of its tail. Lance can’t help but marvel over it, Keith has sanded the thing to sinuous perfection, wood grain creating the supple hint of fur. He even went to far as to etch in the barely there details of individual toes and whiskers. 

How does someone who thinks fingerless gloves are a good idea make something so beautiful?

“Sure,” Lance says. He feels a little bad when he rounds around the back of the counter and sets it on top of the shelf Lance uses to store his coat and lunch box, right where it can be seen from the street. It might be less noticeable, but Lance can’t bear to put the thing right on the counter. He can too easily see it being knocked to the floor and some weak point of it snapping off. Somehow, he doesn’t see Keith being convinced of a shitty glue job the next time he comes in here. 

Lance sees two women approach the door and wills back the nervous tic in his heart as they walk in. He doesn’t have to worry so much about what the cute guy thinks of him when he’s got his sociable smile on. 

  
  


Keith is talented, but he’s...not adept at the whole teaching business. Lance can only see him between the shelves from his place at the front desk. It’s  _ not  _ like he really wants to see more of him.  _ Absolutely not _ . It’s merely out of concern for the students when Keith warns them that the knives are sharp for about the fifteenth time. Keith spends most of the first class going over the basics of woodcutting but he goes at in a way that’s very clearly thought out and methodic. But he still misses little things until someone asks him about it, and the way Keith speaks about it. It’s a bit odd. 

He talks like how Hunk talks about cooking. He can’t really give concrete and detailed answers. Lance knows Hunk has never written down a lot of his recipes. He just knows it by heart, and all the measurements are made with the senses; sight and smell and texture and color, rather than tools. To him, it’s instinctual. Lance gets the same sense from Keith hearing him teach. When the first week’s class is over the students are happy enough, but Lance can see the disconnect between someone who knows something so intimately it’s more sense than logic and someone who’s never even considered the craft before. 

“So…” Lance starts, the second time Keith shows. The street outside is dark enough that the lights inside the store make the front windows into near mirrors. He looks at the wooden panther that’s been sitting in the window for the past week. Behind him, Keith moves slowly around one of the tables, setting out those little carving knives in front of each seat. Lance reaches up and takes down the panther, turning it in the light and looking over all the little details of it. “How long have you been doing this?” In the window, Keith pauses, looks over at Lance with the carving in his hands. He shrugs. 

“I don’t know. It’s just kind of something I’ve always done,” Keith says. He goes back to the box of etched and nicked blocks of wood, each one with a post it with a student’s name. Keith considers them, then seems to think different and just leaves them there. He pulls out a chair and sits instead. Lance lingers, rubs his fingers over the impossibly smooth sides of the panther. How long did Keith spend sanding this thing down? How many layers of gloss or stain polished so perfectly? 

“Yeah like,” Lance hefts the little piece of wood and sets it on the counter beside him. “How long did it take you to make this one?” Again, Keith shrugs. 

“A few days? I don’t really remember, That one’s pretty old,” Keith says. 

“That’s really amazing for a few days,” Lance says. To his surprise, Keith squirms in his chair, a soft show of tensity before he can smooth it back. Two bright spots form on Keith’s cheeks, just under those big beautiful eyes, and Lance’s chest clenches down hard around his lungs. Keith looks down at his hands, rubs his fingers together then pointedly looks at the box of wood blocks on the table. 

“Thanks,” Keith says softly. It sounds so sincere that Lance wonders if the guy is used to flirting. Well hell, Keith is cute. Lance puts on his best smoky look and leans his hip on the counter. 

“It must take really talented hands to make something so fancy,” he says. Keith stiffens and now he changes his mind about the box. He pushes out of his chair and busies himself with pulling out blocks of wood and setting them around the table. Lance chuckles softly, but his belly is turning in strange knots over the way Keith won’t look at him, how red his cheeks are, the really, awfully, obvious way he won’t look at Lance. The really clear way he ponders over a block of wood in his hands, inspecting his fingers. 

Lance is a natural flirt, but he’s never gotten to someone like this. He wants to do it more. 

 

By the third week, Lance realizes two things at pretty much the same time. First, Keith is really getting the hang of teaching this class. He’s got all the students bent intently over their little pieces of wood, shaving tiny piece by tiny piece, rounding corners and nicking the grain into little designs. It’s nothing on the scale of the panther that Lance has rather lovingly nicknamed Cocoa, but everyone is interested, working with intent for small, if rough, detail that he rarely sees other classes achieve. 

The second is that Lance is thinking about Keith a lot. Like. A lot. Like he snuck Cocoa home with him a couple nights this week. That he’d set her on his entertainment system just above his tv. That he’d had to restart his episode of Parks and Rec twice over because he kept thinking about Keith bent over a single piece of dark wood. Hours and hours of shaping, sanding, and polishing, bringing life out of wood grain and dust. A work of tenacity and devotion.

Lance is still thinking about him as he watches the class carefully put away their knives. Keith lingers around the table, answering questions and talking to some of the class with more ease than Lance has ever seen out of him. He’s warming up to them, Lance realizes and a small jealousy rears up in his blood. 

“Why did you want to teach a class here anyways? This is a small store and I’m here pretty much every day. I’ve never seen you before,” Lance asks after the class has gone and Keith is pulling his coat on. Keith’s mouth turns down in a soft frown, fiddling with the zipper of his coat. 

“A friend called Allura and volunteered me for it,” he says. “By the time I knew about it, some people had already paid and signed up, so I was stuck with this.” Lance’s brows raise curiously. 

“Who’s this friend?” Inwardly, he thinks he’s got to thank the guy for introducing Keith to him because he’s got to admit by now that he’s smitten. Keith’s brow knits together in irritation, but his eyes are still big and blue and it comes across as more cute than anything. 

“Takashi Shirogane,” Keith huffs, shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat. Lance recognizes the name as Allura’s ex-boyfriend, a buff guy who works in the bookstore across the street. “I told him it was a pain in the ass to come out here every week just to teach for a couple hours but he just thought it was funny,” Keith complains. It gives Lance pause. 

“You looked like you were having fun tonight,” Lance offers. Keith hesitates, then takes up his box of supplies, held tightly closed with a bungee cord so it doesn’t go flying off the back of his bike. “You seem to really get the hang of taking charge. I know they’re a rowdy bunch,” Lance jokes. Keith sighs and their eyes catch and something zings to life between them. They hold while Lance feels his skin heat, then break away again when Keith looks down at the box in his hands. 

“I don’t know,” Keith says quietly. “It’s not all that bad, I guess.” Lance ponders what he means by that while he watches Keith tie the box down to the back of his motorcycle. He watches him until he disappears down the street, then takes up Cocoa, cradling her gently in his hand while he locks up the store.

 

One night in the middle of the week, when he’s reaching to take Cocoa down from the shelf at the end of his shift, he pauses. In a few days, Keith will host his last class here, and then the tenuous thread between them will snap. If he lets it. Lance stares at the panther but instead of taking her home with him, he goes to the back of the store. 

Woodworking isn’t really a big name craft. They don’t keep much for it in the store. But in the back corner close to Allura’s office there’s a small section for it. On the lowest shelf near the store there’s a row of different types of wood, arranged soft to hard and above that, some craft knives. Lance takes one of the knives and considers the blocks of wood. 

He doesn’t expect to make anything crazy in the few days he has before the last day of Keith’s class comes up. He’s been listening in on what Keith’s been teaching all this time but he hasn’t thought to practice anything until just now. How soft is soft wood? How difficult is it to carve through hard wood? When should he sharpen the blade of his knife? How should he hold the knife, how should he go about shaving and shaping? 

Lance’s eyes settle on a block of soft wood, so pale it’s almost cream colored. White pine. He knows instantly that’s the one he wants. He takes it with him and slips the money for it and the knife in the register drawer. 

He spends a lot of time on Google and Youtube before he even dares to take the knife out of the package. He watches hours of videos, turning the wood block over and over in his hands, wondering if he can really manage this in such a short time. 

Woodworking is nothing like knitting. When Lance knits, the needles and yarn feel like extensions of his hands, like extra fingers he can manipulate without thought. He can make an afghan and marathon Lord of the Rings no problem. 

Lance nicks himself five minutes after he starts. The wood is softer than he expects, and the blade just barely touches the pad of his thumb. He hardly realizes he’s cut himself until he sees the smear of blood soaking into the wood. When he stems the bleeding and gets himself bandaged up, his thumb throbs and he sits there at the table, looking at the wood with the dark smear on the side and the knife, washed and dried, beside it, and seriously thinks just giving up on his idea. He can still knit something. It won’t be big or fancy with how much time he has left. 

But he’d chosen to carve something as a statement. He thinks of Cocoa in all her smooth perfection. Thinks of that bright, clear image he has of Keith working, working working, creating startling detail with the tiniest movement of a knife. Lance thinks of Keith making his way around the table in the store, talking softly to everyone. Thinks about how his heart twists tight when the overhead lights catch Keith’s hair just so. How jealous he feels when Keith reaches out and touches someone, an innocent brushing of hands as he shows someone what he’s talking about because he’s so much better with action than words. 

Lance narrows his eyes at the knife, silently daring it to cut him again. He has to do it like this. He’s got to turn this block of soft white pine into something meaningful. If he knit something, it would just be a little project he tossed together in boredom. It would be something Keith would stuff into his pocket and never think of again. Lance is convinced that, if he can turn this wood into  _ something  _ it’ll have meaning. Maybe Keith will see that he’s put in the time to learn this and maybe (and he might be getting a little hopeful here) just maybe he’ll see it for what it is. 

 

He’s got it hidden under the front counter, right between a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of bleach water. Lance sits on a stool, rests his forearms on the counter and thinks about how awful it looks. Truly, he’s made a mistake here. Keith is little more than ten feet away. He’s answering the last few questions from the class. He doesn’t even have an ending spiel. He’s just simply finished with the lesson and doing the follow up that’s prompted of him. Here in just a few minutes, he’ll round things up, pack his things and he’ll be out the door. Before Lance knows it he’ll be reduced to chumming it up with Shiro trying to weed out what little details about Keith that he can. 

He waves as the class leaves, their projects cradled in their hands. When Keith approaches the counter, Lance loses his nerve at the last second. Instead of reaching under the counter for the white pine, he takes Cocoa off the shelf and sets it on the counter in front of Keith. Keith stops, bites the inside of his cheek, his hands once again stubbornly in his pockets. Lance tries to play sly to hide his nervousness. 

“Ready to be done here?” Lance asks. He nudges Cocoa closer with the tip of his finger. He’s grown attached to the thing; he’s a little sad to let it go. Keith doesn’t pick it up. He shuffles around a little, looking almost antsy. 

“Lance you… I want you to keep it.” Keith says it a little too quiet, a little too fast and Lance is sure he doesn’t quite catch it. 

“I can keep Cocoa?” Lance asks. He’s got this stupid, giddy grin on his face. He knows it. He can feel it. But he can’t help himself. Keith meets his eyes, confusion crossing his features. 

“Cocoa?” Lance pauses. 

“She’s been living with me all month. I got attached, okay? I named her Cocoa,” Lance admits. He stands up, rolls back on the balls of his feet in a show of nerves. He glances down under the counter, at the soft gleam of white pine. “I got something for you too.” He reaches down and grabs it, slaps it on the counter in a rough flurry as if that’ll make Keith see it any less. 

He’d carved the white pine into a heart. Rough and uneven and probably way too small considering the size of the block he’d started with. It’s not smooth like Cocoa, or detailed or even particularly nice looking. The two lobes are slightly different sizes, the point is too sharp and he can see the knife marks where he’d tried to shape it into something halfway competent. Keith looks at it for long string of seconds, almost like he can’t figure out what he’s seeing. Then he makes this soft, huffing laugh and picks it up in both hands. 

“I didn’t realize you were listening to me,” Keith says. He looks at the heart from every angle. He’s  _ really  _ considering it. He looks like he likes it. His eyes go soft around the edges and that little  _ smile  _ leaves Lance feeling so warm he might just fall out in the floor “Thanks. It’s… really nice. I wasn’t expecting this.” 

“You’re welcome-” Lance says. His voice cracks like a nervous school boy and oh man he’s really dropping any notion of being cool or having his feelings together at all right now. He reaches up and fidgets with his hair. His fingers are shaking. Keith considers, then slips the heart into his pocket. He licks his lips, reaches up with his free hand and plays with the tab of his zipper. 

“You want to uhm… You like coffee?” Keith asks. Oh, now he  _ is  _ going to fall out right here in the floor. Swoon like a proper woman in one of his old school romances. Lance grips the edge of the counter.  _ Be cool.  _

“I love coffee,” he breathes. Keith smiles and Lance feels like he’s going to melt. 

**Author's Note:**

> Any and everyone is free to hmu at quiddity25 on tumblr or Quiddid on twitter.


End file.
